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Show HN: LED Website Indicator – an LED lights up when someone visits your site

12 points by tomjuggler ↗ HN
Recently while looking for coding work I connected an LED to my resume site so that I would have instant feedback in the form of a visual notification whenever anyone visited.

People seemed to like the idea when I wrote about it on my blog, so I have made this into a free service. Using ESP8266, my own hosted MQTT broker and WordPress plugin. If you want to try it out, I have the instructions over at https://ledindicator.devsoft.co.za - see the "learn" page.

All you need is a spare ESP8266 module and a WordPress site. I'm concentrating on WordPress for now, but it should be relatively simple to send MQTT messages from other types of websites.

If there is enough interest I plan to do this as a pre-programmed product, with an RGB LED and support for multiple websites. I know you can set this up yourself with Node-Red or Adafruit but I'm going for a very focused product which does one thing well, and is super simple to set up.

3 comments

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yagudaev
That is a cool idea! I have a spare LED panel from a fun IOT project I did one X-MAS, I should try this .

It would be cool to see a video and get the github repo for it

tomjuggler
The Arduino sketch and WordPress plugin are linked on the site, those are on github.

The rest is a flask site I made to register people on the mosquitto mqtt service that I set up on my server - that will eventually be open sourced as well though - I'm concentrating on getting people to test it first.

If you are just doing it for yourself there are a ton of free services, like Adafruit for example. The mosquitto setup was a bit of a mission!

Orionos
How about connecting multiple LEDs to a single website and track what section / page of the site is being viewed? Not sure how feasible it is but it could be fun too.